Lavender Lies (23 page)

Still, things are dicey. When Leatha shows up, I get a clutchy feeling in my stomach and I want to be somewhere else. This was especially true this afternoon, because Leatha opened the door to my tiny office just as I was asking Fannie whether she could come up with an alternative to Adele. Fannie said she couldn’t rattle any names off the tip of her tongue, but she’d take the matter under advisement.

“Let
me
bake your cake, China, dear,” Leatha said, in her slow, honey-sweet drawl. She was raised on a Mississippi plantation, and her years in Texas haven’t parched the Deep South out of her speech.

I put the phone down and gave her the first excuse I could think of. “That’s very nice of you, Leatha, but it’s really too much to ask. Don’t worry, we’ll find somebody.” In other words, thanks but no thanks.

To understand my response, you probably should know that of all the many motherly things Leatha didn’t do when I was a child, baking a cake was at the very top of the list. My absentee father, by virtue of his diligent attention to a high-paying profession, made enough money for us to hire Aunt Hettie, who ran our kitchen as if she were cooking at the Governor’s Mansion, and baked every birthday cake I ever got. My dream mother (who more closely resembled June Cleaver in
Leave It To Beaver
than I now like to think) would not only have baked those cakes, but would have brought cookies to the Troop bake sale, fed me hot soup when I was sick, and made fried chicken and potato salad for picnics. Leatha might manage Sunday night sandwiches and maybe an instant pudding now and again, but I never once saw her put a complete dinner on the table, let alone bake a cake. Much less a
wedding
cake.

“But I’ve been taking a cake course,” Leatha said eagerly, “and it just so happens—a marvelous coincidence, really, just as if it were predestined!—that our class project was a wedding cake. A lovely three-layer cake, decorated with frosting flowers and with the groom’s cake on top. So I know just how to do it.” She pushed up the sleeves of her chic green floral-print dress. “I’ll call my instructor and get the recipe. It doesn’t have any herbs in it, but we can make a rosemary-and-lavender wreath for the plate—which is what we did for our class project. Rosemary and lavender are wedding herbs.”

“I know,” I said, wondering if the people who thought up these things also knew that snakes were supposed to hide in both plants.

“The cake will be my contribution to your wedding day, China. Heaven knows, you haven’t let me do anything else.”

“You’re getting Brian’s clothes.”

“Oh, that.” She waved her hand dismissively. “To tell the truth, I’ve felt positively
helpless.
But now I’ve got something worthwhile and fun to do.”

Now, I grant you that Leatha has accomplished a great many admirable changes in the past few years, metamorphosing from a wealthy River Oaks matron to the practical wife of a Kerrville rancher, from daily drunk to recovering alcoholic. She’s let her hair go from bleached blond to natural silver, and she grandmothered Brian at the ranch this summer while I was trussed up in traction. But from kitchen klutz to wedding-cake baker? The mind boggled.

“I really think it’s too big a job—” I began, but Leatha cut me off.

“Of course you do,” she said matter of factly. “You’re just like your father. He always thought I couldn’t do the least little thing. But he was wrong then and
you
are wrong now, and I’ll show you. I’ll bake you a three-layer wedding cake you’ll never forget.”

That was exactly what I was afraid of. But if I didn’t let Leatha bake the wedding cake, her feelings would be hurt and I would feel guilty, which was the very last thing I needed. Laurel opened the door at that moment, and Leatha announced that she had just been appointed official wedding cake baker.

“Can she really handle a wedding cake?” Laurel asked, after Leatha had left, her signature scent of White Shoulders lingering after her. My mother may have moved to a ranch, but I’ll bet she wears White Shoulders while she’s out branding dogies, or whatever.

“If she can’t, we can always fall back on peanut butter and jelly.”

Laurel’s eyebrows edged upward.

“Well, then,” I said, “how about Sara Lee? I’ll go to the supermarket and get a dozen or so frozen cakes. We can stack them up like a row of bricks and pour a bucket of frosting over them. It won’t be round, but we can tell everybody that rectangular cakes are in fashion.”

Laurel shook her head. “I don’t understand you, China. If this were my wedding, I’d be going absolutely bananas. The groom is too busy to show up for the license, your mother has volunteered to bake your cake, there’s rain in the forecast—”

“You haven’t been watching the Weather Channel?” Laurel’s tone softened. “Gosh, China, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a storm brewing out in the Gulf. Her name is Josephine. She’s still a tropical storm, but they’re saying she may intensify to hurricane strength today. The best guess for landfall is somewhere along the Texas Gulf coast late Saturday or early Sunday. Of course, she could shift to the northeast and head toward Louisiana, in which case we’d be out of the woods. But still—” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“That’s all we need,” I groaned. “A hurricane!” Pecan Springs is far enough inland that we don’t usually get hurricane winds, but a big tropical storm can dump eight or ten inches of rain on us in just a few hours. What a mess! Then I thought of Letty, whose blank, staring eyes would never see another sky, another sun, another storm. What was a little rain, compared to a long death?

I straightened my shoulders. “Time to come up with Plan B,” I said. “If Josephine shows up, we move the ceremony into the tearoom. It’ll be a bit crowded, but we’re all friends.”

“A
bit
crowded?” Laurel asked doubtfully. “How about a
lot
crowded?”

“We’ll open the shops,” I said with determination. “We’ll all stand close together. We’ll make it work.”

“Right,” Laurel said. “We’ll make it work.” She didn’t sound convinced, but she didn’t argue. Anyway, what choice did we have? I checked in with Ruby to tell her—without going into the details—that she could take the wedding cake off her list of things to do. I didn’t mention Josephine.

There might be a tropical storm out in the Gulf but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky over the Hill Country and the temperature was in the nineties. I got in the car and turned on the air conditioning, letting it wheeze for a few minutes before I drove off.

Wanda’s Wonderful Acres is located on Redbud Road, on the east side of I-35 and the Balcones Fault. The fault divides the the Edwards Plateau to the west from the Black-land prairie to the east, a rolling, grassy plain that was easily transformed by the plow into Texas’s principal cotton-producing region. But then the pink boll worm chewed the heart out of the Cotton Kingdom and the droughts of the fifties finished it off. Now, the land produces animal feed. The fields are kept green by mobile irrigation systems that pump millions of gallons of water up from the aquifer and sprinkle it on the hay and sorghum that fatten the beef cattle that provide the cholesterol that clogs American arteries. I’ve heard that it takes twenty-five hundred gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, and when I drive past a huge field when the sprinklers are spouting like a hundred Old Faithfuls, I believe it. I resent it, too, especially at the height of a summer’s drought, when the aquifer levels have dropped like a rock, the springs have dried up, and we’ve gone to a flush-only-when-necessary status. Today, though, I wasn’t thinking about irrigation systems or clogged arteries or even the dwindling aquifer. I was thinking ahead—not very happily—to my conversation with Wanda Rathbottom.

Mostly through the efforts of Quentin Craven, the longtime manager, Wanda’s Wonderful Acres has become Pecan Springs’ premier nursery. Sales have no doubt been hurt by the big home-and-garden warehouse that opened on the Interstate last year, but the competition has been good for the nursery at least in one sense, forcing it to expand into new markets. Until last year, Wonderful Acres stocked only easy-dollar sure sellers—summer and fall annuals, predictable perennials, basic shrubs. Now Wanda has branched out, so to speak, into Texas natives and drought-resistant plants, which the home and garden store doesn’t carry. She also brings in potted herbs every spring and fall, and in that sense we’re rivals. Our competition doesn’t bother me particularly. Even rivals can enjoy amicable relations. But Wanda has always been a sharply competitive and very prickly person.

Quent was nowhere in sight when I drove up and parked in the lot out front. There were only one or two other cars, suggesting that Wanda—if she was there—would not be occupied with customers. The heat had been bad all summer, which is not good for nursery traffic. Browsers won’t hang around hot, humid plant tables when they might be lounging in the air conditioning with a cold lemonade, and experienced gardeners don’t like to see their new plants keel over with heat stroke. In our part of the country, fall is the big perennial season. If you plant in early or mid-October, you can count on a couple of good rains to settle the plants in before the first hard freeze halts new growth.

It was definitely too hot for browsing in a nursery. After a search, I found Wanda, red-faced and irritated, in the cactus house. She was giving orders to a couple of youngsters—horticulture interns from CTSU, I guessed—who were handling the watering. Apparently they had not been doing the job to her liking, and she was reading them the riot act in no uncertain terms. Wanda is a large, strong woman with spiky brown hair, narrow eyes, and almost no eyebrows, and when she gets emotional about something, which she does quite often, her nose twitches. She wore a red denim apron over green twill pants and an extra-size T-shirt that hung to her knees. Her nose was definitely twitching.

“Hi, Wanda,” I said with robust cheer. “Got a minute?”

Wanda glanced at the large man’s watch she always wears. “Only just,” she said pointedly. “I’ve got to make some phone calls.” She motioned with her head. “We’ll go into the office. It’s
hot
out here.”

It was almost too hot for comfort, in spite of the large exhaust fan at the far end of the greenhouse, which kept the air moving. But I trailed behind as Wanda bustled down the rows of plant tables. I don’t much like cacti because they have so many defense mechanisms, but their forms intrigue me. I lingered, bending over a tray of something that looked like a bunch of green mushrooms covered with dense white prickles.

“What’s this, Wanda?”

Wanda paused in her hurrying exit.
“Escobaria leei.
Dwarf Snowball. It has salmon pink flowers in the spring.” She took a couple of backward steps and pointed to another cactus, which was covered with a symmetrical net of stout white spines, like touching stars. “This is
Coryphantha echinus.
West Texas Spiny Star. I collected the seed myself in Howard County, which is about as far north as it grows.” She touched the cactus affectionately. “In the spring, it has the most incredible yellow and orange flowers. Isn’t it gorgeous? And look at this one.” Her voice was slowing down and getting softer.
“Echinocereus dasycanthus.
He’s a real sweetie.”

A
sweetie?
This was Wanda Rathbottom talking? I looked at her sideways. “He’s cute,” I agreed. “What do his friends call him?”

She actually giggled. “Rainbow Hedgehog. When he gets older, his stem will be banded with different pastel colors. His big yellow flowers display red stripes when they close up, like peppermint candy. Soooo spiffy,” she added, verbally chucking the cactus under the chin.

This was a side of Wanda I’d never seen before, and it intrigued me more than the cacti. I turned, catching sight of a long row of large pots filled with the very same ribbed green cactus I’d seen in the Colemans’ walled garden. “Now, that’s a handsome plant. What is it?”

“Cereus hildmannianus,”
Wanda said. “Hildmann’s Cereus. It’s native to Brazil.” She looked ruefully at the row of pots, about twenty of them. “I have quite a lot of it, as you can see. If you know of anybody who wants some ...” Her voice died away. The pleasure was gone. Her nose was twitching sadly.

I waxed enthusiastic. “Isn’t this the same cactus you used in the Colemans’ garden? I
love
the strong vertical element it provides there. So architectural. And the skin—wonderfully leathery and interesting. Really, Wanda, you outdid yourself with that garden. The design, the plants—the whole effect is nothing short of stunning.”

If Wanda was surprised by my hyperbole, she didn’t let on. “Thank you, China. Yes, that little garden came off quite beautifully, if I do say so myself.
Cereus
is an absolutely fabulous plant.” She stroked the cactus as if she were fondling a familiar friend. “She’s a night-blooming plant, you know. Huge white flowers as big as a saucer and so delicate, like porcelain. Letty Coleman hated her, though,” she added, with a small, sour smile. “She said she didn’t like the smell, and she doesn’t like cactus. She didn’t tell Edgar that, of course. The garden was his idea, and he always got his way. He said he wanted to see how it looked before he finalized the contract for—” She stopped. A shadow crossed her face.